Six months ago, Instagram was valued at $1 Billion when they were bought out by Facebook, an amount thought absurd by most. Shortly thereafter came huge changes to their Terms of Service, explicitly stating that they could store and sell any photos uploaded to the site. Users were angry – and rightly so.

The online stock photography market is worth $5 billion each year – and commission photography worth $12 billion. So I guess you can see why Facebook and Instagram wanted to cash in, especially as neither had decent revenue streams. They’ve since changed their terms of service back, for the most part, but the reputation damage was already done.

Now, a new kid on the block is becoming more and more popular – EyeEm. It’s a German “visual search engine” and social network for photographs. The new contender is far from ready for prime-time, and is much smaller than the mighty dominant Facebook. But on the Internet, it’s users’ clicks that matter, and they’re flocking to the new service. Could it be the next Instagram?

With the advent of the smartphone, we are increasingly taking more and more pictures all the time. What makes it even worse, or better depending on how you look at it, is that smartphones are starting to get better in picture quality and almost rivaling mid-level digital cameras. Then we have apps like Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, etc., where we can take and host our pictures for free or for a nominal fee. Needless to say,we all have quite a collection of pictures that we have taken over the years in a variety of different places. Some of them are in Instagram, maybe some on Facebook, and others on our computer.

Over the past year, there have been a few services that have come up that are willing to host your photos and gather them from all of these different places and charge you a fee to do that. Now, granted some of these services have been around for years, Flickr and Photo Bucket to name a few, but it has only been recent that developers are seriously targeting this market for the everyday user. For example, the web app that I have been testing out, Trovebox, caters to and targets the everyday user who wants a place to store their photos. Unlike their competitors, they have some features that set them apart, but will it be enough to convince people to make the switch? Let’s take a look.

Nowadays, it seems that everyone’s sharing pictures all the time on Facebook and Instagram. It only takes a few seconds, and everyone you know can keep up with your life. However, it’s not quite so simple when you have to share those photos with people who are not on any social network. One way to share the photos with them would be to email them every day or upload them on cloud storage services like Dropbox , but that’d be a very annoying task, and the majority of us would forget one day or another.

The solution to this simple problem is PicDigest, a handy service that allows users to automatically send the photos they upload on Facebook or Instagram to people who are not registered on these websites. Want to turn your photos into a quite nice little email newsletter? Here’s the app for you.

When I first started to use Twitter about three years ago, I saw it more as a social tool, a place where I could let people know what I was up to and see what my friends were doing as well. It took me a good five months or so to truly realize how powerful Twitter could actually be and how beneficial it could be for me. I finally understood that it was more than just a place to tell people what I just ate, but it was a way where I could almost instantaneously get news and breaking stories on just about any topic that was going on in the world.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Twitter has continued to evolve. Not just the app itself, but the way that Twitter is used has changed. Take, for example, the hashtag. At first, it was a nice way for us to label tweets as we wrote them. But over time the hashtag has become a powerful way to aggregate tweets and to cut through the noise.

Now, there’s apps built fully around Twitter hashtags, such as Tagboard. Tagboard specializes in this and is able to hone in on making hashtags even more powerful than they already are.

Instagram was one of those iPhone apps that was easy to use, gave you a way to share your precious moments with others, and quickly gathered an impressive fan base that couldn’t quit sharing their love for the app. In fact, just last April, Instagram was so hot, that Facebook decided to buy the company for $1 billion. Now talk about a pay day; that is unbelievable for company that just produced a simple camera app for the iPhone.

But, if you are an avid Instagram user, you always knew that something was missing. The fact that they made it so hard for you to access your pics on the web and to interact and see other friend’s Instagram photos was just a little strange to me. Before they sold to Facebook, I had always thought that they were sitting on a gold mine if they could successfully launch the web side of their app. Well, the day has finally arrived when we can now look at our pics online and have the ability to interact with others. I want to briefly show you around the new profiles on the web as well as talk about what could possibly lie ahead for the future of this app.

A couple of months back, Facebook shook the world with their billion dollar Instagram acquisition, days before going public. As if that didn’t cause enough furore, Facebook’s stocks tanked soon after going public, inviting sharp criticisms from all ends. It sounds too much like the .com bubble of the late ’90’s, the last time the early world of web apps messed up our economy.

Some people even started predicting doom and the end of the world as we know it. Okay, I made that up. But I can’t quite make peace with the fact that Instagram, a company which had only been around for a year and a half now, and made zero profit, is worth a billion dollars.

Outrageous, one might say! But knowing Zuckerberg’s working style and Facebook’s history, I believe there must be some reason behind this seemingly irrational move. In this article, we’ll try to understand how product valuation works, what is an economic bubble, and more importantly, why Instagram.

iPhone users around the world love Instagram – the photo sharing app that allows you to add cool effects to your pictures before showing them off to the world. The effects modify the colors, mood and tonality of your photos and can also add borders, making them look much better than what your phone’s stock camera app can shoot. Instagram’s filters can also be applied to pictures you’ve already shot, and finally, every photo you edit can be shared easily on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Now wouldn’t it be great if there was something like this for the web?

Picfull has got you covered. It’s a simple free app that lets you apply filters to your photos and share them with friends and family quickly and easily. It’s a breeze to learn to use and has a number of nice effects and editable parameters to tweak your pictures till you get the desired look. The effects available are comparable to Instagram and you don’t need any prior experience working with photos to use it. Is this how you’ll be sharing your photos from now on? Let’s find out.

We all love Instagram. I mean, what’s better than taking a photo of your father when he’s sleeping on the couch, just looking nice and relaxed, then stylizing that photo so it looks like it comes from the 1970s, and then, with a click of a button, sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and with your Instagram followers?

I’ll tell you what’s better. The fact that Instagram publishes a public API. Because while doing all the usual stuff with Instagram is fun, finding out what talented developers can do with all your photos is even more fun. As the folks at Instagram say, “Our goal is to make it easier for developers to create interesting and innovative ways to browse the ever-growing volume of photos posted to Instagram every second.”

The proliferation of social networking sites has turned the Internet into a lightning-speed conduit that transmits stream of social data in real-time. We share fragments of our daily lives with a virtual circle of friends in Facebook or Twitter, or perhaps in the brand new Google+. Last.Fm and Imeem lets us create playlists and share them with our friends. We put together galleries of captivating images and share them in Flickr.

The lack of appealing mobile photo sharing features from these social services has attracted a number of tech entrepreneurs to create a mirage of social photo sharing services. There has been a boom in iPhone-only photo sharing apps, such as Instagram and Path, that want to capitalize on the ever-improving mobile camera. PicPlz exist in the same ecosystem, but instead of just providing services to iPhone users, PicPlz aims to become a full-fledged photo sharing service. PicPlz is not an iPhone-only app. Instead, it’s a photo sharing service that lets you share stylish pictures from your iPhone, Android device, or directly from your browser.

With the release of its API in February, users were finally able to interact with their Instagram network outside of their phones, as developers began pumping out web apps. Several good ones have surfaced recently, like Webstagram, Instagre.at, and Gramfeed, and each has its good and bad points and different layers of functionality.

Extragram takes these web apps to another level, providing a slick and easy to use interface for all of the social aspects of Instagram, along with a few (very cool) extra features like location and tag-based discovery modes, keyboard navigation, and real-time notifications.

For those unfamiliar with Instagram, it’s a mobile photo app-slash-social-network that has enough juice to be compared to Twitter. It allows you to take beautiful pictures easily, share them with others via popular social networks, and connect with other Instagram users — viewing their photo streams, liking, commenting, following, and being followed.